As WPP’s direct marketing agency, Wunderman began collecting data about individual consumers before it was the currency of the digital world. “Data was the lifeline of this place to begin with,” said Wunderman’s New York president, Jamie Gallo. “It was very pedestrian and primal data, but it was what the agency was built on.” As […]
Xaxis is placing three bets on how it can evolve programmatic buying, according to global COO Nicolle Pangis. One, it wants to understand the entire consumer life cycle. That means using historical data and a team of data scientists to figure out when someone enters the market for an item and the best time to […]
Xaxis, despite scrutiny of its principal-based buying methods in the ANA’s June report, will grow at a forecasted rate of 25% year over year, WPP said on an investor call Wednesday. Based on the holding company’s H1 earnings report, neither WPP nor Xaxis have yet taken a major hit from the ANA’s findings. Advertising and […]
When DigitasLBi appointed Emily Macdonald as its first head of programmatic on Thursday, it wanted to ensure all employees across planning, buying, data and analytics teams are trained on programmatic buying. The newly created international role comes from Publicis Groupe’s recent reshuffle to integrate programmatic as a service across all of its agencies, beginning last year […]
WPP-owned ad network-slash-tech shop Xaxis has its first-ever Latin America CEO. Lucas Mentasti was promoted from the unit’s Latin America managing director to its chief. It’s a big step up from where he started in 2013, moving from Publicis-owned Starcom to head up Xaxis’ Latin America business. At that time, “head up” meant doing everything, […]
Are programmatic advertising and creative storytelling finally coming together in a meaningful way? It’s a good question to ask at the Cannes Lions festival, where the whole point is creativity – or it used to be, before the twin powers of data and media started elbowing in on the joint a few years back. But […]
Xaxis is getting its ad tech house in order with the creation of a new role: chief technology officer. Filling those shoes at the WPP programmatic trading desk is Bob Hammond, whose career spans some of the most recent greatest hits in ad tech M&A. Hammond, whose appointment was announced on Tuesday, served as CTO […]
Xaxis, WPP’s programmatic media company, is a bit of lightning rod in the advertising industry for a few well-documented reasons. However, it’s undeniable that the ad net/trading desk/tech shop combo invests a lot into its own data, partnerships and technologies. Consider, for instance, the $25 million it put into its proprietary data management platform Turbine […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Nicolle Pangis, global chief revenue officer at Xaxis. With $6.3 billion destined for illicit hands this year, according to the Association of National Advertisers, ad fraud is clearly a major […]
With the exception of back-to-school needs, office supply retailer Staples focuses on small-business owners. Like most brick-and-mortar retailers, Staples knew mobile played a vital role in its customers’ daily lives, but it was less clear from a media standpoint how mobile impacted the ultimate sales conversion. Staples wanted to use mobile to drive upper-funnel awareness […]
Judging from last week’s news, it’s tempting to say GroupM has got the programmatic religion. But that might be selling the holding company short. WPP Group’s media-buying arm, which controls $106 billion in global ad spending, last week promoted Xaxis CEO Brian Lesser to a big new job running its North America business. His elevation […]
Like all programmatic buyers, Xaxis faces a challenge – and that’s securing the best and most inventory for its clients. In a publisher waterfall, ad servers generally prioritize programmatic below direct-sold campaigns, prompting other buyers and exchanges to start asking publishers to implement a practice known as header bidding. But Xaxis, WPP’s trading desk (or, […]
When WPP’s programmatic arm debuted Xaxis Audio last month, it did so with the intention that it would not be used in isolation. “For us it’s another arrow in the quiver when you’re doing programmatic media planning,” said Nicolas Bidon, managing director of Xaxis in the UK. “This is a new way to reach audiences […]
“Marketer’s Note” is a regular column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving, digital marketing technology ecosystem. This week it is written by Lizzie Komar, Associate Analyst, AdExchanger Research. Last week, during an on-stage conversation at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O event in San Francisco, Omnicom Digital (OMD) chief Jonathan Nelson described the agency’s evolving approach to technology, data, partnerships, […]
Last week, WPP launched the “marketing foresight” consultancy Gain Theory, housed within GroupM. Gain Theory, which has 200 people and a new office in New York City, rolls together two existing WPP agencies: the London-based marketing effectiveness agency Ohal and the Bangalore-based data analytics firm Meritus. Jason Harrison, previously CIO at Maxus, has been appointed […]
For a holding company, WPP is an aggressive buyer of ad tech – most of which winds up within its GroupM unit Xaxis. Since Xaxis absorbed 24/7 Media in December 2013, the programmatic media company’s investments in tech, most of which are acquisitions, have been methodical. The most recent occurred Monday, when Xaxis revealed it […]
iSocket’s former CTO, Karl Bunch, will help focus Xaxis’ discipline around its demand-side products. Bunch, an ad tech vet who also worked at Time Warner Music, CPXi and AppNexus, started as Xaxis’ VP of global product development last week. The WPP-owned programmatic media company revealed the hire Tuesday. Bunch’s immediate prerogative is learning Xaxis’ business and […]
One hundred percent desktop ad viewability sounds like the simplest thing and an easy standard to meet. But advertisers still are in want, publishers wish they could provide it and this demand has generated frothy press releases from the ad tech community with “100% viewable” bolded in the header. The problem is that “100% viewable” […]
WPP Digital President and Xaxis Chairman David Moore stepped up as chairman of the IAB Tech Lab Board of Directors on Monday. His goal is to help the IAB establish standards to promote interoperability within the ad tech diaspora. Efforts will include creating a code base to make it easier for tech companies to implement […]
Omnicom Group’s programmatic buying discipline is still in its early days, the agency holding company emphasized during its Q3 2014 earnings call Tuesday. Programmatic buying constitutes just south of 2% of the company’s overall revenue, which reached $3.75 billion during the quarter, up 7.4% YoY. Most of the growth came from the North America region, […]
Roku, the first streaming player to translate Netflix to TV, has reached the 10 million-device mark. With 1,000-plus channels ranging from free to subscription (Hulu Plus, Netflix) and on-demand services (HBOGo and WatchESPN), Roku is scaling up its ad-supported vertical. Bringing publishers and brand partners onboard in a cookieless, connected TV environment comes with its own unique challenges, […]
AppNexus wants to rethink the publisher ad server as a holistic platform for yield management, and it’s starting with a rather old piece of technology. The company will acquire Open AdStream (OAS) from Xaxis as part of a major transaction with WPP Group that will also give the holding company a $25 million stake in […]
Triton Digital, which builds ad tech for digital and broadcast radio, unveiled its supply-side offering, Triton Advertising Platform (Tap), available in two flavors: one for traditional broadcasters and an on-demand offering for Internet-based radio stations. Over the next 18 months, Triton is going to onboard its roughly 6,000 stations in the US, EMEA, LATAM and […]
It wouldn’t be the first summer weekend French agency holding company Publicis Groupe sent shock waves through the advertising ecosystem. Close to the anniversary of the infamous ad merger of equals that never quite materialized as Publicis Omnicom Group (POG), French pub Boursier reported on a rumor the holding company could be close to extending […]
On Tuesday at the Cannes Lions festival, leaders of the world’s four largest agency trading desks participated in a panel hosted by Rubicon Project. The discussion touched on a wide range of topics, including deal automation, technology investment and transparency. One macro takeaway is that the so-called trading desks resemble each other less than they used to. […]
When Xaxis released its proprietary data-management platform (DMP) last week, competitors backhanded the WPP-owned tech shop with compliments. On the one hand, $25 million is an impressive figure for a company to invest in technological innovation. On the other hand, what good is this technology if clients are scared off by Xaxis’ opaque business model? […]
GroupM made waves last week when Ari Bluman, chief digital investment officer for North America, said WPP Group’s media agencies will stop buying impressions in open auctions by the end of 2014. It turns out that’s not quite the case, as Brian Lesser, CEO of WPP’s Xaxis programmatic platform, made clear in public comments Tuesday […]
Yet another data-management platform (DMP) has hit the market, at least for clients of Xaxis, WPP’s trading desk. The DMP, called Turbine, is the fruits of a $25 million investment. “The strategy we designed with Xaxis was to develop the pieces of the ad tech stack that gave the most competitive advantage to our clients,” […]
WPP Group’s addressable media unit, Xaxis, has acquired Netherlands-based BannerConnect, a 10-year-old company that evolved from its roots as a traditional publisher network to embrace the exchange-buying trend. BannerConnect has headquarters in Sittard and satellite offices in London and Amsterdam. In addition to bringing on the 40 employees in those locations, Xaxis gets technologies for […]
WPP Group’s digital and direct marketing agency Wunderman and its media-buying agency MEC have launched a joint venture called CHOREOGRAPH to address converging client demands in paid, earned and owned media. The proliferation of cross-channel marketing campaigns and the subsequent need to marry transactional, customer and demographic data with audience-level information drove CHOREOGRAPH’s creation. “Over […]
